Page 22 of Gotta Dig Deep
Glenna crawled back into the bed alongside Pen, arranging their limbs so they tangled comfortably.
“Do you remember the day of the twister?” Her whisper wouldn’t carry past his ears, and she kept it soft as she started another story. “Sky dark and rolling black clouds, and you were determined to finish that last section of fence. Do you remember? I rolled up on the four-wheeler and you wanted to cuss me out so bad, I could see it on your face. ‘Glenna, why aren’t you in the storm cellar?’ And my answer was enough to take the wind out of your sails. ‘Because if you’re out here, this is where I belong too.’ We finished the fence, and you followed me in your truck, honking and waving all the way back as if I didn’t see that rope dangling from the clouds just like you did. We got into the cellar just in time, because that twister got close enough to toss the well shed around, breaking it up into kindling. You kept asking me why. Holding me close, us listening to the storm overhead, and you asking ‘why, Glenna, why?’ And I never changed my answer. I won’t now either. Where you are is where I’m supposed to be, Penn. So you stay here with me, you hear me? Stay with me.”
Chapter Six
Horse
“Hey, boss.” Horse answered the phone, holding up a single finger to Devil, the Houston member he’d been talking to. Didn’t matter what he was doing, if Blackie called, Horse would always pick up. In the months since becoming a member, he’d been kicked up the food chain and become the home chapter’s fixer, so it wouldn’t do to miss news on a potential problem. “What’s up?”
“Andy… Slate, needs our help.” Anger was held on a taut leash in Blackie’s voice, the emotion so fraught with need it snapped Horse’s spine straight. “Rebel Wayfarers have a few folks there in Houston at the show, and they’ve found themselves in possession of a package needing delivery.”
“Anywhere, anytime. Tell me where to go. RWMC are good allies.” Angling his head, he focused on the words in his ear. The ones spoken, and the silent message, arguably more important.A package is a person.
“I’ll let JD know what’s up.”Good.That took the responsibility off Horse trying to give orders to a chapter president when he was a lower officer, albeit from Mother. “Houston has a van. Take Turk and Angry Mike with you.” Blackie rattled off directions that had Horse gesturing at Devil for a pen and paper. “Meet up with Slate, make nice with the visitors, and pick up what they’ve got boxed and ready to go. Boys down there in Houston should know the kind of receiving area that’s needed.”
Horse repeated the instructions back to Blackie, the single grunted response confirmation he’d remembered everything. Pushing down any misgivings he had, Horse shoved a pair of sunglasses onto his face and gritted, “You got it, boss. We’re on it.”
Hours later, he was poised on the edge of a bench in the back of a van looking down at a man marked for death. They’d left the highway behind a while ago, and then abandoned the county roads for private ones bisecting pastureland. After crossing yet another cattleguard, the vehicle bumping and jolting, he told Turk, “Looks as good a place as any.”
Three of them, him, Turk, and a big man called Angry Mike, had picked up the bull rider outside Houston, and after their last similar run, it should have been Angry Mike’s turn to ride with Turk. The two of them had a conversation while Horse was in the bathroom at a truck stop, and before he knew what had changed, they were dropping Angry Mike off at a well-known whorehouse. Turk’s laughing promise to pick him up on the way back had pissed Horse off. He wasn’t at all pleased with the arrangement leaving just the two of them to deal with the matter at hand, but it wasn’t his chapter, so it wasn’t his call. His presence at the charter’s launch had been chance when Blackie got the call from Slate, or he’d have been hearing about everything second- and thirdhand.
Bending over now, he loosened the rope holding the small bull rider into a hogtie position. With three they could have lifted and carried, but just him and Turk would require more handholds to wrestle the guy out of the van.
“How you wanna do this?” Turk’s question was barely audible over the sounds in the van. “We need to send them something afterwards.”
“You know how hard it is to get something out of your head?” Once he’d regained consciousness, the bull rider had been mumbling throughout the entire ride, and Horse had gotten good at ignoring him.
He opened the side door, slamming it behind him and then opened the back of the van just as Turk rounded the corner from his side. Each of them grabbed a boot and walked away, dragging the man onto the ground, still muttering about riding bulls. Then his words turned to the woman he’d tried to kill earlier tonight, someone the Rebel Wayfarers counted club royalty. Seems this Ray Nelms had been hunting and hurting her for years, and the bad karma he’d built up had finally caught up with him in a big way.
“Shut him up,” Turk complained loudly, and Horse yanked off his shades to glare at him, then down at the man on the ground.
He’s going to be dead in a couple of minutes. Maybe he’s got something important to say.
Pulling back and tucking an arm of the glasses into the neck of his shirt, Horse told Turk, “His jawin’ don’t bother me none. We’ll have to take the vest off him for this. It’s got that shit bull riders wear. Not Kevlar but close.”
Nelms seemed to finally realize he was about to die. As Horse leaned down and pulled at the tabs holding the vest closed around his chest, the man arched off the ground and shrieked, “The families. They’ll never know.” Arching his neck, with red-rimmed eyes, he glared up into Horse’s face. “They gotta know.”
A chill went through him at the words, but he brought out his gun as Turk started a countdown. “On three.” The metallic sound of a round sliding into the barrel of a gun was loud in the open air. “One.”
“Gotta know what, asshole?” Leveling the weapon, Horse kept his expression impassive, not wanting to reveal the sudden urge to know his words had woken.
“Two.”
Nelms looked into Horse’s face, past the gun aimed at his head and breathed out a long, slow rush of air. “Where they’re buried.”
“Three.”
The report from Turk’s pistol sounded just before Horse’s finger tightened on the trigger, both their bullets finding the mark. Turk pulled another round and then fired a third time, Nelms’ body jolting with the impact. The man’s eyes had already started to glaze over, lids sagging half-mast as muscle tension fled with the end of his life.
Horse stared down at the man lying in the dirt, lethal bullet holes in his head and body, blood and fluids already leaking out into the sand of the desert. “Did you hear what he said?”
Turk bent over, grabbing one of the dead man’s arms. “Help me get him over to the ditch. Wind’ll cover him with shit pretty fast if he’s down in that little gully.” When Horse didn’t move, Turk angled his head to stare up at him. “Jesus, Horse, fuckin’ pull your weight here. I ain’t doing this shit by myself.”
“When the hell you live in is inside you, what do you do?”The bull rider’s voice echoed through his head, but he shoved that down, not wanting the words to take up space inside his mind. Stooping, he gripped a limp wrist and tugged, surprised as always at how heavy the dead could be. Together, he and Turk wrangled the body to the nearby dip, rolled it down the slope, and let it lay as it had landed, elbow angled up towards the sky, a wing that would never take flight.
A sand-filled gust of wind deposited a first wave of debris along the side of the corpse and Horse took a minute to kick more on top of it, suddenly not wanting to see the man’s slack face anymore. The corpse’s eyes were still open, and he felt as if everything they did was on display.
“Hold on, lemme get a pic. You said Blackie mentioned they’d want one.” Turk bent at the waist to angle his phone as he took several pictures, consulting the screen with each one, ensuring they met whatever documentation standard was in his head.
